Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.
It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.
Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamoring for Relief.
Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.
Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.
In vocal prayer we go to God on foot. In meditation we go to God on horseback. In contemplation we go to God in a jet.
Neither theological knowledge nor social action alone is enough to keep us in love with Christ unless both are proceeded by a personal encounter with Him. Theological insights are gained not only from between two covers of a book, but from two bent knees before an altar. The Holy Hour becomes like an oxygen tank to revive the breath of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the foul and fetid atmosphere of the world
The mark of the Christian is the willingness to look for the Divine in the flesh of a babe in a crib, the continuing Christ under the appearance of bread on an altar, and a meditation and a prayer on a string of beads
It is a long established principle of the Church never to completely drop from her public worship any ceremony, object or prayer which once occupied a place in that worship.
